One Thousand Years (6 page)

“And
it is the forbidden fruit,” added Bamberg.

Vinson
shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “It will not be improper
after we return home,” he mumbled, his mouth full of food.

“What
is forbidden?” asked McHenry.

“Relationships
with superior or subordinate officers are discouraged,”
answered the doctor. His lips formed a smile. “Or with anyone
in the SS.”

Barr's
eyes widened. “Ach, you know!”

“It
was obvious when the two of them brought in Herr McHenry.”

Vinson
turned to a confused McHenry. “She was with me on the mission
to retrieve you,” he said. He then looked to Barr. “And
she is a very nice person. All we did was talk. It's not a
relationship. She doesn't even know how I feel.” The other
men laughed.

“The
whole ship knows how you feel,” said the doctor.

“Mtubo?”
asked Vinson meekly.

“He
is not blind. Your tongue was practically on the floor.”

“
Scheiss!”
exclaimed Vinson. “Do you think she knows?”

“That
is not a little girl,” said Bamberg.

“She
has been around the town a few times,” the doctor noted. “She
is a hundred years older than you are.”

Startled, McHenry blurted out, “You're kidding!”
Again, he wondered how old everyone was.

Bamberg
laughed uproariously. “That must seem strange to you. In your
day, no one even lives that long.”

“How
long do you people live?”

“With
proper care there are no limits,” said the doctor.

Bamberg
put his hand on McHenry's shoulder. “See, you thought you had
died, and now you will live longer than anyone down there.”

Those
ramifications hadn't really hit McHenry until just that moment, and
even then, only superficially. At twenty-four, he was a young man
who had faced death, but old age would have been too far ahead of him
to fully appreciate.

The camaraderie reminded him of the good times he had with his squadron,
and he wondered what his friends were doing.

As a teenager, when becoming a pilot was still only a dream, McHenry had
read
High Adventure
, James Norman Hall's account of his days
as a World War I combat pilot. He thought about that book now, here
in the officer's mess. The book concludes with Hall's crash behind
enemy lines, and then his capture by the Germans. Hall spent the
first evening having a friendly dinner with the German pilots.
It was not a reception McHenry had ever expected for himself, and yet,
here he was.

They chatted for a long time, mostly small talk. The three men were Tiger
pilots. They promised he would get plenty of time to see the ships.

Adolf Vinson was the only one they called by his first name. At first,
McHenry thought he might be poking fun at the name Adolf, but he soon
realized it was because he was the youngest among them. At 28,
Vinson was the only man close to McHenry's age. Barr made a vague
hint that Vinson got this assignment through family connections, but
it was never made clear, and McHenry didn't ask.

McHenry learned that Barr, of African heritage was born in Peenemünde,
Germany. Bamberg was born in London. On McHenry's prompting, he
found that both were in their 400s. The doctor was a mere 145.

The
men laughed and the conversation quickly turned to pilot matters and
Barr described his teenage years when he first learned to fly an
old-style winged aircraft. “And I took it into the controlled
air lanes once, mixed in the same traffic as the regular cargo
transports going three times as fast as I was. The turbulence was
great fun for a youth like me, but I had been in the lane less than a
minute when my teacher called me, screaming his head off!”

“Very
daring!” Vinson declared. “If I had tried that, my
instructor would have thrown me out!”

“I
was restricted for two months,” Barr acknowledged. “And
I was forced to march rounds every night.” Then he turned more
seriously to McHenry. “But at least I had a strong modern
airframe. I think every pilot on this ship looks at your experience
as quite challenging.”

“That
is correct,” Vinson agreed. “We would be eager to hear
some of your adventures first hand.”

McHenry
felt all eyes were on him. He had many stories to tell, but all he
could think of was his duty, and the men he had flown with. “I'm
afraid I can't discuss our flight operations,” he said blankly.
“That would be classified.” It all came out almost
automatically, and he knew it sounded strange to these men, but he
felt it was the right thing to do.

The
men were taken aback. There were a few long seconds of silence until
Barr guffawed, but that was quickly followed by an approving grin
from Bamberg. Vinson and the doctor remained silent for a few
seconds more.

“You
are a good man,” said Bamberg.

The
doctor was the next to speak. “Gentlemen, Herr McHenry had
seen what might have been jets or rocket planes.”

“No,”
Vinson said, apparently happy to change the subject. “That is
too soon. They were not flying in your area.”

“There
are still only test flights,” said Barr.

“I
don't know what they are,” McHenry said. “Nobody does.
All I know is that we've seen some very fast aircraft.”

“Never
heard of anything you would not recognize as an airplane,” said
Bamberg. “Are they combat aircraft? Have they ever attacked
anyone?”

“Not
to my knowledge.”

“What
do they look like?” asked Vinson.

“Round
and silver and very fast.”

“
Traumsehen?”
asked the doctor.

“Yes,”
Bamberg concurred.

The
men left their plates and they all walked to the doctor's dispensary.
McHenry didn't like the idea of a medical experiment, but Vinson
promised he would find it interesting. He took a seat on the edge of
the first bed.

“This
is a very old technology,” said Vinson.

The
doctor spoke a command, and a cabinet opened to reveal a metal
elliptical ring. The doctor fitted it to McHenry's head. “Do
not worry, it will not harm you.”

A
view screen over the bed lit up with a bright moving pattern of
shapes. The men gathered around and watched it form patterns.

“You
must concentrate on the craft that you saw,” the doctor said.
“Try to imagine it in your mind and then watch the pictures.
The machine is measuring the part of your brain that recognizes
images. It will redraw these designs until it senses that you see
something familiar in them.”

The pattern turned and shifted several times, and changed into circles,
ellipses, triangles, and innumerable polygons and then returned to
ellipses again.
They stretched and flattened until it came closer to approximating the
oval form of the ship he had seen.
It gradually developed a three-dimensional texture.
The colors stopped changing, and then the image finally resolved itself
into a picture as vivid as McHenry's memory.

“Ach!”
Bamberg stammered.

“That's it!” McHenry exclaimed.
He was so surprised to see that the machine could create the picture
that he didn't register the shock on the other faces.
Barr and Bamberg ran out the door.

Vinson slapped his hand to the swastika on this collar.
“
Kontrolle!”
he shouted.

“
Ja, Vinson,”
a voice replied.

Vinson spoke quickly in German.

“What's
going on?” McHenry asked the doctor. “What was that
thing?”

“The
enemy,” the doctor whispered. “Our enemy.”

*

“Once before in our
lifetime, we fell into disunity and became ineffective in world
affairs by reason of it. Should this happen again, it will be a
tragedy to you and to your children and the world for generations.”
—
Secretary of State Cordell Hull, (April 9, 1944)

Vinson ushered McHenry back to
Kontrolle
.
He refused to utter a word about this enemy of theirs.
“I'll explain later,” he had promised,
despite McHenry's attempts to make him share a hint.
The corridors were empty, the entire crew at their alert stations.

Kommandant
Volker and
Oberführer
Mtubo were obviously prepared for them.
The starboard side of the dome had a sky blue background
with a full size image of McHenry's sighting.
The silver spaceship seemed to hang there outside the dome,
motionless, in three-dimensions.

A second SS man stood beside Mtubo.
A white man with dark hair.
McHenry had not seen him before.
The black uniform had nearly similar oak leaf markings,
a rank just one level below Mtubo's.

“Herr
McHenry, this is
Standartenführer
Stern,” said
the
Kommandant
. “He is the project's research
director.”

Stern
wasted no time. He gestured to the image on the dome. “Is
this what you saw, with no prompting from anyone?”

McHenry
instinctively identified Stern as a no-nonsense worm of a man. His
eyes could look straight through McHenry, as though studying him like
a bug. “That's exactly how I remember it,” he replied.

“We
added no details whatsoever,
Herr
Standartenführer
,”
offered Vinson. “We have not even discussed the Grauen yet.
We were ordered to keep things light for the first few days.”

Mtubo
muttered something in German that McHenry didn't understand.

“Rechner,
display for us a
Grauschiff
null neun,”
ordered
Stern. A new picture appeared in the air. It was an image similar
to the one the machine had drawn, with exhaust vents beneath it.
“Could this be what you saw?”

“I
only saw it for a second,” McHenry admitted. “But I
don't remember those holes along the bottom.”

Mtubo
issued a command in German and the picture changed again. “And
this?”

“Exactly
like that.”

“A
Geier,” Mtubo
said. “Definitely the older model.”

“So,
they did not follow us here,” the
Kommandant
acknowledged. “Assuming we are correct about ship classes.”

“No
matter,” Stern concluded. “It is virtually certain that
this one did not alter history as we know it.”

“Why
so?” the
Kommandant
asked.

“It
is the certainty of cause and effect,” said Stern. “An
event like Herr McHenry's sighting of the Grauen would have affected
the timing of his subsequent actions. Even if the timing difference
was small, it still would have affected fractions of seconds spent
shaving, eating breakfast, and countless other deviations in how he
lived and worked in the twentieth-century. For most people, on most
days, this might not make much of a difference. The small affect on
the action of an ordinary soldier would be corrected once he
concentrates on combat. But Herr McHenry is an aviator, flying a
craft by hand. The cumulative effect would certainly have been
enough to affect his flight path into the bird that disabled him.”

McHenry
had listened intently and understood at least part of it. “You
mean, if I didn't see that ship last January, I wouldn't have been
thinking of it yesterday, and so I might have taken an extra
second or two, more or less, to get to altitude, and that would have
been enough to miss the bird.”

“Correct,
Leutnant
.”

“But
what's the point?” McHenry asked. “Wouldn't I have been
better off if I hadn't seen that ship?”

“Probably
so,” Stern replied. “But the real issue is for us to
know that our history has not been changed. Everything is
progressing as it should be.”

“Not
quite,” Mtubo interrupted. “The sighting was not in our
records. Why was this not reported?”

“It
was,” McHenry stated. “I was also debriefed by two
British officers.”

Stern had a faraway look. “We will have to look into that. This one
discrepancy could be a boon to our research here.”

“Thank you Herr McHenry,”
the
Kommandant
said.
“But we are still faced with the reality of the presence of Grauen
in this time period.
Should we alter the mission profile to
Platt Zwei
,
Oberführer
?”

“
Ja,”
Mtubo concurred.

The
Kommandant
turned to address Vinson. “Thank you
gentlemen, you are dismissed.”

“
Jawohl!”
said Vinson.

The
Kommandant
turned to shout orders to the crew in
Kontrolle
.”
The image of the Grauen ship disappeared, and they were surrounded
by stars again, with the Earth below. She turned briefly to McHenry
and Vinson, smiled and nodded, dismissing them.

Mtubo
stopped the two men at the stairs. “Good work,” he said.
“You have been a tremendous
help, Herr McHenry. We will summon you if we have more questions.
Heil Renard!”

“
Heil
Renard!”
returned
Vinson.

McHenry
wondered how soon he would be expected to say that, should he not
manage to escape. The thought disturbed him. He looked down at the
blue uniform he was wearing and questioned whether he should have
kept his mouth shut about the ship. The words echoed through his
mind,
You have been a
tremendous help.

Vinson
led the way through the doors to the elevator. “What's going
on?” McHenry asked. He had wanted to learn something about the
Grauen.

“We
will go to the hangar deck,” Vinson said as the elevator doors
closed behind them. “
Flugzeughalle,”
he ordered. “I think
you would like to see the Tigers, which is the class of work ships we
use. They are very likely going to send one out now. We have
satellites, or buoys if you will, in orbit around the Earth. They
look down and record history for our analysts. They are nearly
invisible, but some more so than others. We cannot allow the Grauen
to find and capture the most detectable ones. Our procedures mandate
that those be retrieved now. The
Kommandant
will likely be taking us to a higher orbit so that we can continue
monitoring events in Europe directly.”